Have you ever had an object you thought you had gotten rid of that suddenly turned up? Or some gift that everyone kept giving you for some reason?
While it sounds like something that would be rare, I think these phenomena are more common than people suppose. After all, it made its way into fantasy. I can think of two prominent examples.
The sword Riptide in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series always reappears no matter how thoughtlessly Percy might set it down in pen form.
Similarly, the books of wild magic in The Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey not only can the books not be left behind. If Kellen Tavadon fails to pack them, the books will inevitably show up shoved into a random inconvenient place in his pack.
My family on my mother’s side has a rather famous (within the family, anyway) instance of this. It involves my great-uncle Wilmer.
My great-grandma Riley got him a white scarf for Christmas one year. She was quite happy with her gift. Wilmer was perhaps less so, as he never seemed to wear it.
In fact, by the time Christmas rolled around again, he had yet to put it on even a single time.
So what did great-grandma Riley do? Why, she fished the scarf out of the closet, boxed it up, and gave it to him as his gift again that year.
From the hilarity that ensued, a family tradition was born. No matter how hard Wilmer tried to hide the scarf, it would always be found by someone just in time to be wrapped anew (always in different sizes and shapes of boxes, of course) to be gifted to him again.
At least one year, this got taken to an extreme, and just about everyone in the family got Wilmer a white scarf. He kept opening box after box containing a white scarf masking whatever his real gift was. He had a whole closet full of them by the time I was old enough to hear this story.
I don’t know if Wilmer ever actually wore any of his white scarves. Probably I knew at one time, but I don’t recall anymore. Still, I’m sure the experience was just as fun for him as the rest of the family, even if he did roll his eyes.
This story has come up several times recently, and I’m starting to think I need to use this phenomenon in a piece of writing. How I’m not sure yet, but I think there’s some story fodder there.
